Amazon is on the cusp of using more robots than humans in its warehouses

https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-warehouse-robots-automation-942b814f

by jbredeche • 1 year ago

65 63 1 year ago

malfist4• 1 year ago

If Jassy had his way, Amazon's sole employee would be him and he'd be rent seeking everything down the line with robots and AI.

He has no vision beyond what is best for him personally. Other people aren't humans.

isoprophlex• 1 year ago

Is amazon a net benefit to humanity? Is extreme disintermediation in general a beneficial thing, where there is only the consumers left, paying rent-like tithes into one big pocket, without an economic ecosystem in between?

IAmBroom• 1 year ago

Looking just at their physical-item distribution model, I'd imagine it's far more carbon-efficient than physically shopping.

Case 1: I drive to the store to get a widget. There is a low chance Store-1 doesn't have it, and I have to keep shopping. Regardless, I am driving about 30 minutes total, conservatively.

Case 2: I order a widget from Amazon. The Amazon driver organizes their stops to minimize travel time, and it's undoubtedly less than 30 minutes driving from the previous stop.

Both cases require transport of goods from factory to the final storage location (shopfront or Amazon warehouse), so the difference there is negligible.

dfxm12• 1 year ago

Yes, he is a capitalist. This is the logical result of capitalism.

rybosworld• 1 year ago

This mindset is more common than not among executives.

I think there's a non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years.

diggan• 1 year ago

non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years

With that said, there is probably also a non-zero chance that something like that wouldn't be negative but something positive instead. I suppose that'd be the ideal scenario.

danjc• 1 year ago

That would be bad for anyone selling stuff

Henchman213• 1 year ago

“Executive” is another word for “sociopath” so this is unsurprising.

MangoToupe3• 1 year ago

I think there's a non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years.

I can't imagine this would last long with the social instability that would follow.

That also seems like a gross overestimate for many industries. Many supply chains are nowhere near able to be automated to the extent this ratio would imply.

HardCodedBias2• 1 year ago

Have you worked with him?

I had the privilege of working with him for a little over a year.

He was respectful, analytical, and only thought about what is best for Amazon and Amazon's customers.

I don't think his own aggrandizement or what's best for him enters into the calculus of his day-to-day work one itoa.

He's an untiring as well. I realized I had gone far beyond my peter principle when I was working with him.

malfist4• 1 year ago

I have worked with him.

He's a robber baron, not a captain of industry.

Don't have to look much past his "gobble gobble" email to see that, nor his announcement of RTO the day after an all hands where remote work was touted as the future.

turnsout• 1 year ago

How's that UBI coming? Oh, totally off the table you say? Well, the people will surely find something better to do than rising up.

zdragnar• 1 year ago

The cotton and wool mills may not have been great for the Luddites, but everyone else benefitted. Using terms someone else used in a sibling thread, they were a "net benefit for humanity".

monocasa2• 1 year ago

I don't think the parent is making the argument that this level of automation can't be a net benefit for humanity, just that if it results in nearly the entire middle class and down being laid off at the same time with no recompense, that's an almost perfect storm for revolution, violent or not.

merth• 1 year ago

net benefit for humanity

Some people might argue that wealth concentrated in the top 1% is a net benefit if you look at it as one big pool of resources. But will the remaining 99% actually see any of that benefit? Or will the 1% simply tighten their grip, keeping the rest dependent on their “generosity”?

exe34• 1 year ago

Thinking "there will always be something else for everybody to do" because "there's always been something else for everybody to do" is like the dinosaurs thinking "we've always been fine after a meteor strike".

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

that depends on how important it is to people to be able to continuously overbuy cheap, poorly-made, low-quality disposable textile goods.

ben_w3• 1 year ago

"Rising tides lift all boats" — one of the problems with the mills, was that the people who got richer from them didn't help keep the impoverished Luddites from drowning. This is why Marx et al invented Communism. Can we, perhaps, avoid doing it all so badly this time?

krapp• 1 year ago

Oh don't worry. Americans at least will be kept so busy in the mines (for which they yearn) and fighting wars that they won't have the energy to rebel.

dogleash• 1 year ago

What a meaningless metric. Number of discrete robots is not a measurement of productivity, labor, task throughput or anything like that.

Also the regular yada yada that non-robot automation offset people, non-automated tools also reduce number of people needed.

pydry• 1 year ago

It's not supposed to be scientifically meaningful it's a reprinted press release that is supposed to spin a narrative that makes Amazon workers feel insecure about their jobs and investors feel confident that those wages will shortly be converted into dividends.

You can tell what the Wall Street Journal's true feelings are about automation by reading an article about retirement and dividing the number of times they use the term "AI" by the number of times they use the phrase "demographic/retirement crisis" e.g. in https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/blackrock-larry-fink-a...

baggachipz• 1 year ago

"Robots don't take bathroom breaks, so you shouldn't either. If you're lucky, we'll let you work for a little while more until we can replace you with something cheaper. Now, back to work!"

bryanlarsen• 1 year ago

There are hundreds of computers in every car. We all know that this number has little correlation with human replacement.

Robot is a term with such a wide range of capabilities that a simple count is meaningless. Just like a tiny 4 bit micro that monitors a single sensor isn't comparable to a computer running a large LLM.

m463• 1 year ago

I wonder if there are more shelves than humans?

freefaler• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/Yuggp

urda• 1 year ago

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-warehouse-robots-automation-...

joules77• 1 year ago

Amazon is also on the cusp of becoming the largest company by revenue.

quantadev• 1 year ago

Counting robots is like counting circuits in a piece of electronics: It's Meaningless.

However what would be interesting is if they ever have a situation where the number of humanoid robot employees outnumbers human employees. Once someone is able to run an entire large corporation with no humans at all it will be a big milestone I guess.

But there's no real driving force for this to happen, because the humanoid form factor is not necessarily ideal for most kinds of industrial applications. And a lot of the "Automation" will be AI Agents, which have no form factor at all, being purely knowledge based.

WillAdams• 1 year ago

It is an interesting contrast to "lights out manufacturing" --- there are a lot of CNC companies where day shift runs short jobs, and then loads up pallets of materials and stages empty pallets for finished parts, loads the programs and sets quantities and so forth, then presses "Start", and turns out the lights to leave --- there might be a skeleton crew to deal with any issues which arise, often not.

Henchman213• 1 year ago

I’m sure that when more than half of us are unemployed that we’ll just sit quietly and know our place.

What’s that you say? People with nothing left to lose tend to put the heads of Capitalists on pikes for all to see? Well maybe you should have thought of that before pillaging the commons and treating people like slaves? But “fiduciary duty to shareholder value” you say? You made that shit up in the 1950s and have been pushing it like it were true ever since. Saying a thing doesn’t make it true.

djoldman• 1 year ago

The most interesting stat to me is:

The number of packages that Amazon ships itself per employee each year has also steadily increased since at least 2015 to about 3,870 from about 175...

onlyrealcuzzo• 1 year ago

That's impressive growth, to be sure.

But shipping about 0.5 packages per employee per day is not impressive to start...

It's no wonder Amazon didn't make money for a very long time.

davey48016• 1 year ago

It says "ships themselves". I interpreted that as meaning through their own delivery service versus UPS/USPS, and I thought those third party shipments were still picked up at Amazon warehouses. Meaning this could have much more to do with Amazon building out their delivery service than with warehouse efficiency.

I'm also under the impression that most of the Amazon delivery drivers are contractors, and wouldn't count in "per employee" metrics.

Suppafly• 1 year ago

Depending how you define 'robot', it's sorta surprising this hasn't already been true for years.

Amazon is on the cusp of using more robots than humans in its warehouses

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